


Borderline

by Lunatic_Lullaby



Category: DCU (Comics), Teen Titans (Comics)
Genre: All Talk No Action, Angst, grey morals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-22
Updated: 2012-02-22
Packaged: 2019-06-28 16:59:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,604
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15711471
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lunatic_Lullaby/pseuds/Lunatic_Lullaby
Summary: Without meaning to, Tim has made his first kill. People react differently.





	Borderline

**Author's Note:**

> Set after Bruce's Return, pre-52. In the Titans of Tomorrow storyline (the one with a team of murdering egomaniacs from ten years in the future led by Tim), future Zatara was standing on Tim's side. Characterization of both assumes that those future selves really were once them.

The room has gone silent when Tim feels a rush of exhilaration at what he's done. Two-Face has fallen still on the floor and for just a moment, he's glad. Part of him thinks, _Finally,_ and can't be bothered to care about what his actions meant for Harvey Dent. He's just killed a man but his first thought is that they'll never have to be afraid of him again or cycle through the endless dances of reforms and betrayals. He'll no longer have to dread the man finding a lucky day when a Robin just won't be fast enough.  
  
He's relieved.

The guilt and horror only come as his mind clears. There's a thumping in the other room that should be Damian working his way free and when his little brother comes to find him, he'll be walking in on a murder scene. It will hardly be the first body he's encountered, this is the boy who once handed him a decapitated head with pride, but somehow it feels very different for him to be the one responsible.

It was unintentional. His movements had been made clumsy by the drugs in his system and a bid to get the knife away from himself had been too strong and sent it slicing into Harvey's neck.

The cavalry crashes through the boarded up windows, Dick stopping to stare in shock once he lands. Jason merely pauses, far less phased, and comes to help him off the floor. He wraps an arm around his shoulders in a partial hug as Tim leans against him, and then he's promising that Tim did the right thing.

Tim wants to hide somewhere and just be sick for awhile. Reality is sinking in more sharply by the minute.

He has to explain to the Commissioner. Shake hands. It wasn't his fault. It was entirely his fault, but 'I understand, son,' and would his father understand?

Yes. Battles. Self-defense. Good soldiers. Jack Drake had a militant heart at his core. You do what's necessary and the rest will take care of itself. 

 _Batman_ doesn't understand, and Tim nods numbly and agrees to the gravelly suggestion that he voluntarily bench himself for awhile. Tim isn't Dick, and Two-Face will always be Harvey to Bruce.  But he can't stay in Gotham without working, there's too much temptation in the city for a vigilante to resist. So he heads out to the Tower, where he can regroup and rest while still helping the team in his civvies and a mask.

_______________________________

That was his plan before he walked into their common living area and was confronted with most of the team.

Kon held his hand out in a staying gesture when he noticed his alarm. "Tim," he started with a pained wince on his face, and just like that Red Robin turned to leave.

Bart brought him up short with a sudden appearance in front of him. His gold eyes were very wide. "We're just concerned," he said with both hands in the air. "In a non-accusatory way. Without any shouting. Because we love you."

"I say cudos," Rose commented from the group behind him. "Way to bag 'em, Boy Wonder."

"Maybe we could send you both to the same support group," Cassie told her with a growl in her voice.

Tim turned around. "I don't need therapy."

"Actually, you could probably use it," Bart commented.

Tim gave him a look.

Bart blinked. "In the way that we could all probably use it? Because vigilantism is a huge, hard, dangerous thing, which forces us to go to a lot of dark places."

"That sounds kind of dirty," Rose advised him with a stage whisper.

"There isn't any staggering moral debate for us to have," Tim told his friends in a clipped tone. "What happened was an accident."

"You _accidentally_ killed Two-Face after he tortured Robin," Cassie said incredulously.

"Yes. After he drugged me to get me out the the way, affecting my motor skills," he explained impatiently, having already been through this repeatedly with first the police and then his family.

"Great accident," Rose said.

"You know, that's been the only suspect thing in all of this," he said tiredly, "people saying I did well."

"You won't hear that from us," Cassie assured him with a stony expression.

"Except Rose," Bart amended.

"And maybe anyone else with common sense, once the uppity team captain has left the room," she added.

"Will you shut up? This is serious," Cassie insisted. She had already done battle with a Tim from the future who got his start on the road to megalomaniac evil through killing supervillains. It wasn't something she wanted to repeat with the boy she'd been friends with since the days when she had fought crime in pigtails.

"I don't intend to repeat the experience," Tim assured her uncomfortably.

Kon came forward and placed a hand on his shoulder, giving a firm squeeze. "We just want to make sure you're okay, man. Really okay, not 'I can handle it' okay."

Tim held his eyes with his gaze and tried his best to look steady. He wanted to be the boy Kon knew; the person he was the week before. 

"I will be," he promised, but his voice sounded all wrong. If he could just stop thinking. Stop seeing his hand guide Harvey Dent's against his own throat, making that one quick downward slash.  Part of him felt like he had ended _both_ their lives but insane and dramatic statements like that didn't belong in a place where the people he loved were asking to be reassured that he was _stable._

Cassie sighed and dropped her defensive posture, coming forward to wrap him in her arms. Kon pulled them both in and it turned into the usual group hug, Bart tucking himself against his side under Kon's arm. Tim took a deep breath and tried to relax.

"We'll help," Cassie promised sincerely, her lips at his ear, and it was an act of willpower not to argue that he was fine or cry because he definitely wasn't.

_______________________________

There was a knock on his door at three am that night which he would have attributed to Kon or Rose had the footsteps been different. Only one person in the Tower wore dress shoes on an everyday basis.

"Come in," he called apathetically. He'd been doing busywork at his desk after waking from visions of blood spattered gauntlets and Harvey's last choking breaths.

Zatara opened the door just enough to reveal himself, leaning against the frame and holding up two shot glasses and a twenty-four ounce bottle of Zesti, which didn't really mesh in Tim's mind.

"We're going to pretend to drink?" he asked disbelievingly.

"I've found it's a good policy to not drink real alcohol when you're depressed. Of course, if you want I can turn Zesti to wine," he offered, a cautious teasing in his eyes.

"You were missing from the interrogation," Tim said in a flat tone. His face was blank as he wondered how _this_ moment of judgement would pass.

Zach's expression sobered and he came into the room, closing the door behind himself. "I thought it would be crowded enough." He walked passed Tim's place at his desk and sat on the bed, commandeering the nightstand as a serving bar. "I assume they found you Not Guilty?" he asked as he poured.

"Not quite," Tim said with an unamused smile. He rolled his chair over and accepted a glass.

"Then you're on some form of probation," Zach concluded. He put his feet up on the bed and laid on his side with his left arm propping his head up. "You won't get in trouble for having a boy in your room after hours, will you?"

Tim huffed a small laugh, hiding a wavering smile by taking a sip of his soda. He swallowed and looked down at his bare feet. "They're worried I'm going to lose it. Like the other me who became Batman and turned the country upside down."

"There are a lot of steps between there and here," Zach pointed out quietly, watching him.

"Why aren't you more bothered by this?" Tim demanded, his attention sharpening as he looked up and stared into him. His eyes were an olive hazel today and Tim wondered how he kept changing them if his spells couldn't affect people. Maybe they were just contacts.

"Aside from wanting you to be alright, I don't particularly care about your slip," Zach said in a bored way, shifting one shoulder in a lazy shrug. "You were fighting for your life. Two-Face chose to put you in that position. These things happen." His eyes narrowed in thought. "I'm surprised they don't happen more often," he said, not believing the odds. "How do so many common criminals keep walking away from getting punched by Superman or shot with arrows or being electrocuted?"

"Because the League are professionals," Tim reminded him, his voice higher than usual as he held back a wave of hysteria. "They conduct themselves with restraint. Which is what I'm supposed to do."

"Hm." Zach eyed his perfectly manicured fingers, wrapped around his glass. "That's fiction," he said.  "We all know Wonder Woman kills people when she has to."

Tim's eyes darkened. "Don't start a talk about how killing dangerous psychopaths is acceptable. I've already had that conversation with Jason - and again with Rose - and you don't want to be fool number three."

"I am never a fool," Zach refuted bitingly with a sneer. Then he smoothed his expression, not wanting to dig himself into a fight when he had come to offer peace. "I only mean that the boy scouts of the League don't keep their clean records through perfect self-control. They lose their heads all the time. I've seen it happen. Sometimes all that stops them from crossing their moral boundaries is stupid _luck._ And that isn't because they're threatened, it's because they're angry. _You_ lost it because your life was in immediate danger."

"I'm trained not to," Tim told him. "Robins are taught to _never_ take that option.  I _choose_ to put myself in the way of harm, so I don't have the same rights as a civillian. Batman did everything he could to make sure that I would never look at fatal attacks as an option in the field, would do everything possible to avoid endangering _anyone's_ life, and now I've let him down. That's why I'm here," he said, gesturing around his room, "instead of in Gotham."

Zach raised his eyebrows. Bats. They were endless baskets of impossible standards and self-recriminations.  Tim hadn't sounded so much like he was one of them again since he'd dropped his 'R' for a bird on his chest.  Zach wet his lips as he considered his words with morbid fascination. "You're hardly the first of the Bats to slip up," he gambled. It was something he assumed had to have happened to most of them, quietly shuffled into closets and dealt with internally.

"Jason," Tim agreed blandly.

"Aside from Todd's infamous killing sprees. Those don't count as slips, he defected first and did everything intentionally."

Tim thought better than to bring up Damian, who had committed enough murders by the age of eleven to be put away for a thousand years.  That wasn't the sort of thing he thought anyone should be informed or reminded of now that the kid had changed.  "I don't think Cass counts, since she was drugged."

"You were, too," Zach pointed out, confused.

"I was _gassed._ It was a little disorienting and I wanted a nap more than a knife fight but I was still myself. It doesn't compare to what she went through."

"There really haven't been any miscalculated punches, batarangs which missed their mark...?"

"No," Tim denied, but he averted his eyes and pressed his lips into a grim line.

"What is it?"

Tim shook his head. He remembered when Dick had beaten the Joker to death but since Bruce resuscitated the monster no one else seemed to recall the incident. "Family business," he dismissed, knowing it wasn't a story Dick would want to be shared.

"And your second family sings the same tune as the first," Zach continued, swinging back to the Titans as though he had never asked about the potential hypocrisy in the Batcave, reaching to top off their glasses of fizzy water.

"Only instead of shuffling me off, I'm under observation. And it's possible my best friends are picking out a team of psychiatrists for me to see."

"Now that's love," Zach said wryly. He was silent for a beat, then two. He had something to say and he was hoping that it wouldn't get him thrown out of the room.

Tim tensed minutely and observed him more intently as clues began snapping together in his mind. "Maybe," he said.  Or maybe 'love' was coming to listen to him when he was still awake at three in the morning, with a peace offering in hand and kind words at the ready.

"I don't wish to add to the shower of bloodlust you've been congratulated with," Zach said cautiously, sitting up on the duvet with his legs crossed under him to face Tim more evenly.

"You think I did the right thing," Tim had already concluded. "If it hadn't been a mistake," he said with some difficulty, "you'd still think so."

"You were easy prey under the influence of sedatives. If you hadn't killed him, you'd probably be dead. Robin might have died too.  That makes things very simple for me," Zach said plainly, his eyes serious.  "Your life and the life of a child against a mad mass murderer's?  Don't insult me by asking."

Tim closed his eyes. He had a new wash of guilt for wishing everyone could feel that way, if they loved him so much.  In retrospect, Rose's friendship with Damian was probably why she was trying so hard to support Tim; child killers were always fair game in her book, never mind when she _knew_ the kid.

"I'm sorry it happened," Zach offered quietly. "But you didn't do anything wrong."

"Don't tell me that," Tim found himself whispering, "I can't believe that."

Zach sighed, exasperated. He drew a hand through his hair and tamped down on his frustration. The goal of not letting Tim curl up in his room and stew in despondence wasn't going as well as he had hoped. This was why he usually preferred dealing with professional relationships over friendships.

"I just need to keep working," Tim said, sounding more like himself. "Nothing will erase what happened but other people in the business have moved on from this sort of thing before. It just takes time and distractions."

Zach quirked an eyebrow and couldn't help the half-smirk which came over his face. "Now distractions, I can offer," he said slyly.

Tim stared at him, aghast that he would think this was a good time to try to pick him up.

"With a case to work, of course," Zach corrected his assumption smoothly.

He sighed and nodded readily. "What've you got for me?" he asked gamely.

With some restraint, Zach did not say 'Everything,' 'Whatever you'd like,' or simply smile suggestively.

What did slip out was, "More than you can handle," but all considered that wasn't so bad. It did get Red Robin to give him a sharp look as he took up the gauntlet and accepted his challenge.

And if Tim still looked like a wreck when he did it, there was always tomorrow to better ease the strain.


End file.
